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Continued from yesterday’s instalment
The  brothers, continuing their pursuit, came to place where Jatayu was lying valiantly holding his last breath in the hope of seeing Rama and Lakshmana. The last moments of Jatayu are woven with love and pathos and this scene especially deserves our attention. But since the role of Rama is greater in this scene, it is more appropriate to devote our time when we take up
Rama.
What Lakshmana inferred turns out to be true when Jatayu narrates what had happened. After performing the last rites Rama who was dulled by the rush of events, one calamity after the other is again enthused by Lakshmana. The two cantos that follow show Rama pushed to the end of the tether and he talks of giving up his life again and again. One such is the Ayomukhi incident.
At nightfall, Lakshmana goes into the jungle to fetch water for Rama. There in the deep jungle, he is confronted by Ayomukhi, an ogress who sets her lustful eyes on Lakshmana and falls in love with him. She forces him to stay with her. Finding that Lakshmana won’t budge, she finally decides to carry him away to her cavern, keep him there for some time in the hope of winning him over with the passage of time.
It takes a very long time for him to return to Rama, who left alone to himself, is impelled by his painful emotions and wanders the jungle in the dark, lamenting loudly fearing that he has lost Lakshmana forever. His endeared wife is missing; he lost Jatayu whom he considered next to Dasaratha and loved and respected and now Lakshmana is missing. Troubles seemed to be rushing in on him in an endless stream.
The verses describing him going through agony and pain deserve to be studied. We tend to think Rama being a superhuman, did not have as many troubles as we encounter in our lives. These agonising moments of Rama go to show that he lived an ordinary human life as any of us and he went through all the painful moments that we, the very ordinary, go through in our everyday existence. And when we study that despite being pursued by legions and legions of painful moments and learn that he came out of them shining like a beacon, we have a lesson for our existence. ‘If even Rama had to go all this, my troubles are nothing before what he went through.’
His love for Lakshmana, which usually finds expression in the absence of Lakshmana, just flows out from his melancholic heart that tends to give up unto panic, in the feeling that Lakshmana is permanently lost to him.
‘ennaith tharum endhayai, ennayarai, ponnaip porugindra polam kuzhayaal thannaip piriven uLan aavadhdhaan,’
If at all I am living even after the death of my father, pain of living away from my mothers and after losing Sita in this jungle,
‘unnaip piriyaadha uyirppu alavO’ it is because I have you with me and have not lost you. My very life hinges on you. Where are you O Lakshmana! What happened to you! Why is it taking such a long time for you to come back!
Rama pours his heart out in fifteen verses, describing what Lakshmana means to him. Let’s see a few of them, for they bring out the quality of Lakshmana beautifully. Who else can describe his qualities more eloquently, beautifully and passionately, than Rama!
More follows...
Published on 24th March 2002
Hari Krishnan
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